20 ms·

Opera moves to WebKit

938 points by bdash 14y ago

octix 14y ago
It's always good to have choices, however I still cannot understand the advantages of Opera over it's open source siblings...
wooptoo 14y ago
While I agree that webkit is a great piece of software, what happens when everybody switches to webkit? Will Google/Apple/developers simply ignore other engines and let it become the new IE of the decade?
nkuttler 14y ago
"Opera is for people who appreciate choice, and we are going to make it even easier to choose Opera in the future." That's a nice spin. Less rendering engines, more choice!
- szalansky 14y ago
  Yes and no. Less work for frontend guys I believe. More choice for you, because you can get the same decent looking pages (theoretically) with a different UI of the browser. And, IMO, here is where Opera wins - their UI is superior to Chrome's and Safari's.
  - rplnt 14y ago
    Its ability to configure basically anything from user interface is far above any other browser. Chrome is a browser that I recommend to parents. It has dumbed down interface, zero options - perfect for average majority. It is still powerful when combined with dozens of extensions, but it still can't compete with Opera in this area. It's like KDE vs Gnome3 if that makes more sense for someone.
    - lucian1900 14y ago
      I like Chrome's UI. There's almost nothing it doesn't do that I'd want. I could totally do without extensions if I had to, but they are nice to have.
    - LeonidasXIV 14y ago
      My Firefox feels like Vim, I suppose Firefox wins in the configurability department, at least when you include plugins. Of course, only desktop Firefox.
andybak 14y ago
Mixed emotions here. I think it makes every sense for Opera to do this. The cost of maintaining their own rendering engine must have been huge and the advantages it brought were slender. It's also good to have another major player contributing to webkit. On the other hand it's a step closer to an unhealthy monoculture in rendering engines. It's already the case for the mobile web that people are starting to define standards as 'whatever webkit does'.
- fpgeek 14y ago
  I wonder if, ironically, rendering engine diversity is something where the slow, incoherent Android update mess is actually a good thing. To the extent that "whatever WebKit does" gets defined as "whatever ugly, lowest-common-denominator thing that works in the stock Gingerbread browser" that might help other rendering engines stay in the race. In other words, legacy Android browsers might help by slowing down the spread of new WebKit-specific features (that they also don't support).
- goldfeld 14y ago
  Well, webkit being something open and contributed to by many players in collaboration, couldn't we think of it as part of the standard itself? There isn't some evil monopoly to be had in only having one rendering engine, as much as there isn't so in having web standard technologies such as HTML5 and CSS3. I think this is right on for Opera, it has always set itself apart by it's usability and features and I think browsers need to get innovating more on that front.
  - gcp 14y ago
    The problem of having the standard defined by an implementation is that it makes it almost impossible to have another implementation. This is fine if we agree here and now in 2013 that WebKit is the only rendering engine we'll ever need. That just doesn't seem like a smart bet to make. Opera was in some ways better than the WebKit browsers on mobile devices, except for broken Webkit only sites. That ain't going to get better now.
    - 14y ago
wluu 14y ago
Interesting... I wonder if they'd now consider opening up their browser engine as an open source project? Not for any reason other than, if someone in the future wanted to. They could fork it and extend it and perhaps make something awesome. Nothing may actually happen, but you never know if you don't give it a chance to...
bdash 14y ago
In an email to the WebKit development mailing list[1] Håkon Wium Lie, the Opera CTO, mentioned that they've had engineers working on WebKit for a while now, and they'll soon be contributing their work on multi-column layout to the WebKit project. [1]: https://lists.webkit.org/pipermail/webkit-dev/2013-February/023820.html https://lists.webkit.org/pipermail/webkit-dev/2013-February/...
- bdash 14y ago
  And their first contribution is already attached to https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=15553 https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=15553!
szalansky 14y ago
At last. Opera used to be my favorite browser, thanks to their sophisticated UI. But I gave it up when HTML5 started coming in. I believe it had problems with Javascripts too. Is mobile Opera very different from the desktop one? I see many Android users using it and being happy.
- pornel 14y ago
  The great irony is that Opera has started the HTML5 effort: http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/2005-09-01/ http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/2005-09-01/ back then it was called Web Forms 2 and Web Applications 1.0.
pestaa 14y ago
WebKit was the reason why I started using other browsers -- I'm very excited to see it in Opera! I wonder what'll happen to Dragonfly, their integrated development platform? It was a neat project, although arguably inferior to Firebug/Chrome Dev Tools in many areas. Good luck Opera!
- mcrittenden 14y ago
  I was wondering that too. I assume Dragonfly will die and they will switch to WebKit/Chromium's dev tools instead. If that happens, I very much hope that they will rebuild Dragonfly's unique bits for WebKit's dev tools and submit them as patches, so nothing of value is lost.
spicyj 14y ago
And then there were three. Which will happen first, the death of one of (WebKit, Gecko, Trident) or a new popular rendering engine not related to any of them?
- kibwen 14y ago
  High hopes for Servo[1], but it'll still be years yet until it's able to challenge any of those three. Webkit2[2] will probably be ready sooner, but it's less of a radical departure than Servo's intended to be. [1] https://github.com/mozilla/servo https://github.com/mozilla/servo [2] http://trac.webkit.org/wiki/WebKit2 http://trac.webkit.org/wiki/WebKit2
  - bdash 14y ago
    WebKit2 is a new API layer on top of WebKit, not a new browser engine. It has been used by Safari since v5.1.
    - kibwen 14y ago
      Are you sure about that? When I read quotes like "web content (JavaScript, HTML, layout, etc) lives in a separate process from the application UI", that conjures images of a rather drastic and fundamental change. I'm not sure how you'd achieve that with just a new API layer.
      - bdash 14y ago
        Yes, I'm sure. The same core rendering engine, known as WebCore, is shared between both WebKit1 and WebKit2 on OS X. WebKit1 is used by most applications that use a WebView to display web content, while WebKit2 is used by Safari. The different API layers set up different delegate callbacks for WebCore so that they can tweak the behavior to fit their architecture (single process vs separate web and UI processes).
      - gcp 14y ago
        Firefox for Android does this, and it's not like the underlying Gecko engine is different.
gl0wa 14y ago
Now it's time for IE to switch to WebKit as well. Also, they should make it available for all versions of Windows.
- yuhong 14y ago
  Well, it's MSHTML rendering engine is used by many other apps too, for one thing.
grandpoobah 14y ago
Does this mean they'll be using V8 too?
- devongovett 14y ago
  Yes it says so here http://my.opera.com/ODIN/blog/300-million-users-and-move-to-webkit http://my.opera.com/ODIN/blog/300-million-users-and-move-to-...
- bdash 14y ago
  The press release notes that they're using the Chromium port of WebKit, so it's very likely that they'll be using V8 as a JavaScript engine.
- szalansky 14y ago
  I'm curious too! I think Javascript in Opera was a bigger problem than HTML. A year ago I worked on an app with heavy JS frontend and frontend guys told that they can't make it work properly on Opera.
  - zobzu 14y ago
    Yeah, I think they're actually switching for V8 more than anything. Their HTML layout engine was/is pretty much fine.
    - bdash 14y ago
      At http://my.opera.com/ODIN/blog/300-million-users-and-move-to-webkit http://my.opera.com/ODIN/blog/300-million-users-and-move-to-... they state they're switching because they feel it is a waste of resources to maintain their own rendering engine. I'd be surprised if the JavaScript engine was a big factor in their decision. The vast majority of "JavaScript" problems encountered by web developers are either problems with the DOM implementation in general. A smaller portion are in the binding between the DOM implementation and the JavaScript language, and fewer still are in the JavaScript engine itself.
      - 14y ago
daGrevis 14y ago
All I can say is "Woohoo!".
lordlarm 14y ago
I worked for Opera the summer of 2010 and I've also been using the browser the last couple of years. Compared to Google, Apple, Microsoft - it is important to understand that Opera is a small, very small, company. I'm very happy to see their resources better used to innovating and improve their exiting product, rather than trying to catching up to the other browsers. A big loss for the general state of rendering platforms though, with now only Webkit, Trident and Gecko as serious contenders.
- Arelius 14y ago
  It breaks my heart to know that Presto is going to most likely be left to bitrot in some SCM somewhere. But on the same note, I understand that using webkit will be better for Opera as a browser.
  - fpgeek 14y ago
    I wonder if Opera will consider open-sourcing it, or if it (typically) has too many problematic dependencies for that to be worthwhile.
    - Arelius 14y ago
      Considering they are switching to an open source rendering engine, I think there is likelihood they would have open-sourced presto already if that was possible. I suspect that like much proprietary software, there are too many licensed dependencies. It's a pity, because it'd be very cool to get a source dump of the final presto engine. Even if it was never integrated into a new browser, the historical value alone would be significant.
      - rplnt 14y ago
        Opera's response to Open-Sourcing always was, that they would have no business that way. Apple doesn't care I believe, Google/Microsoft are in it for search and ads, Firefox isn't a business (and they make all money from search I think). While Opera makes a lot of money from search, they have a lot of OEM deals that they are afraid to lose. So if there was no legal constraint, Presto could see day of light. If nothing else, then in patches to webkit :)
afshinmeh 14y ago
Seems a great news but I can't really understand the benefits and differents between Gecko and Webkit, can someone say?
- qznc 14y ago
  For the normal user it does not matter. It just matters that there are competing engines. As long as there are multiple implementations, we will have a formal standard for HTML and Co. If e.g. everybody (Microsoft,Mozilla) would adopt WebKit, then nobody would bother to extend the HTML standard. Just implement it in WebKit. Soon, HTML will be a mess like Office Open XML.
- jacques_chester 14y ago
  For historical reasons, Webkit has turned out to be much easier to work on than Gecko. With Gecko you get heavy-duty OOP module system riding shotgun (XPCOM). That seems to be a sufficiently high barrier to contributors that only Mozilla are using Gecko with any seriousness. Webkit has evolved out of a different history as a sorta-kinda standalone component of KDE to be much more approachable to outside contributions. Since Apple forked it from KHTML it's gone from strength to strength.
viseztrance 14y ago
Great news for Opera. Unfortunately this is another reason for developers to ignore other browsers and use proprietary webkit prefixes.
- Arelius 14y ago
  I'd generally agree. But my impression is that Opera had small enough market share that people overwhelmingly ignored it anyways.
drinchev 14y ago
As far as I hate monopoly and the things that happened years ago with IE6, I'm a bit afraid of what's going on here. I really appreciate the fact that coding a website with webkit bugs in mind will automatically include support of Opera browser now, but does this mean that the whole web will start to code exclusively for webkit engine? This doesn't feel good. I'm afraid webkit will start to dictate features and their bugs-workarounds such as [1] will remain untouched for years. [1]: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/14773587/possible-or-misused-feature-overflowhidden-weirdness/14773817#14773817 http://stackoverflow.com/questions/14773587/possible-or-misu...
- Arelius 14y ago
  Besides the fact that I think Firefox is now actually a really great piece of software, this is a primary reason why I continue to use Firefox while everyone else in the office uses chrome.
  - drinchev 14y ago
    Yes, you are right, I really love to hear that. But as a webdeveloper my first task after I write some code is to test it in a webkit browser. Webkit is everywhere iPad, iPhone, Chrome, Safari, ( now Opera ). I think bad developers will start to exclude other engines support if percentage of non-webkit browsers goes very low. And since a lot of websites are coded from amateurs ( there's nothing wrong to this ) there will be more and more webkit-optimized content. That's sad!
    - gcp 14y ago
      Note that there's some fragmentation in WebKit as well. I think that developers that assume it will make their lives a lot easier will be slightly disappointed in the end.
    - jaytaylor 14y ago
      >> I think bad developers will start to exclude other engines support if percentage of non-webkit browsers goes very low. Bad developers are already ignoring everything except whatever single browser they [might have] tested in. This move certainly is unsettling, but I think you can come up with a better argument about why.
deleted 14y ago
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blaabjerg 14y ago
Interesting move, but I guess it was pretty much inevitable considering how much WebKit has been surging ahead the last couple of years. This might be wishful thinking, but I hope they'll expand the desktop team and spend more resources on UI and UX now that the UI basically is the only killer feature on the desktop. I'd love to see Opera on the innovation forefront once again!
jasonkester 14y ago
Smart move. I don't know a single web dev who tests on Opera anymore. I personally stopped worrying about it for any of my products when it hit 1.6% market share, and that was five years ago. They're essentially not supported by anybody, and haven't been for a long time. ... But that's never mattered, since they have always known it. And they went out of their way to make sure they rendered exactly like the dominant browser. For the longest time, they'd match Internet Explorer quirk for quirk, so if you supported that you supported Opera. Now they see that Chrome is going to win, so they're switching to copying Chrome instead. And since Chrome has a nice drop-in "Chrome in a box" rendering engine they can use, it's going to be a lot easier to pull off this time around. They'll continue to be the browser that nobody cares about (aside from six people who are no doubt here in this thread somewhere), but your site will probably render fine on it. EDIT: Looks like those aforementioned Opera devotees have arrived. This comment went from 6 points and the top slot down to 1 point in the last ten minutes. Funny, since it's not actually an anti-Opera comment (or of course the sort of thing that down-votes here are usually reserved for).
- ohwp 14y ago
  "I don't know a single web dev who tests on Opera anymore." Hi, I'm a dev who always develop for Opera. The reason: if it works in Opera it almost is working in all other browsers. And I ofcourse like Opera very much. I think it has one of the best interfaces and toolsets. "They'll continue to be the browser that nobody cares about." This is a very stupid statement. 300 million monthly users care about Opera. The HN "community" != the rest of the world.
  - hkolk 14y ago
    Working for one of the biggest sites in the netherlands: 0.31% is Opera's market share at our site. It's not on our supported browsers list
    - Freestyler_3 14y ago
      That's probably just me.
ed_blackburn 14y ago
Here's a scenario: As a network provider I wish to subsidise the hardware on my tariffs further still. I can shape traffic, sell advertising and analytic's to achieve this. Now if only I could get a capable proxy service compatible with the common browsers on iOS and Android. Is Opera's core proposition a browser or a service? What differentiates them from their competitors? I read this announcement as a candid admission that they can compete better with their proxy service than with their browser. I suspect the future of Opera is as a SaaS proxy that happens to have a client ready too. A proxy for shaping or sniffing (mobile) traffic has many advantages to those in emerging markets and those who wish to push advertising down our throats cough cough Facebook and Google.
lazyjones 14y ago
That's going to make them less competitive in my opinion, although it's an understandable move considering their size. I am wondering about the timing though - now that HTML5 is finally a standard and browser developers can stabilize their rendering instead of playing catch-up with the latest draft features, it's a bit late to switch. They would have benefited more by switching 2-3 years ago.
micheljansen 14y ago
Wow, that's a huge step. Being the #4 rendering engine was really hurting Opera though. Most people use WebKit or Gecko during development and then make it work in IE as well, but never get to Opera. One of the main reasons I stopped using Opera for browsing was that, despite having some great features (always loved their gestures), so many sites just didn't work properly. I hope this will only make them contribute more to pushing the web forward, as they have always done.
Aissen 14y ago
Three weeks ago, they let clues out: http://www.pocket-lint.com/news/49375/opera-ice-new-webkit-browser http://www.pocket-lint.com/news/49375/opera-ice-new-webkit-b... http://www.theverge.com/2013/1/19/3892646/opera-shows-off-new-webkit-based-ice-mobile-browser http://www.theverge.com/2013/1/19/3892646/opera-shows-off-ne... (those were posted here but didn't get any discussion so I won't bother linking)
EGreg 14y ago
A win for web developers, in my humble opinion, as the rendering engines converge. With open source projects like WebKit, why do we need so many proprietary engines competing with each other? It creates more target environments for all the web developers and designers around the world to repetitively test. This is a great example of how platforms, when open sourced, can beat proprietary silos which fuel the engine of capitalism. While the competition between proprietary silos, together with the copyright + patent protections they require, does drive innovation forward, it does it at great cost (in the amount of litigation required to protect the IP, in the lack of interoperability, and the increased cost for everyone producing for multiple platforms). By contrast, an open source project can develop much more similar targets that have incentive to interoperate and accept contributions from others. For example Linux variants, and now WebKit and its derivatives.
dschiptsov 14y ago
This is how it works - open source quality created by enthusiastic community wins proprietary crap produced by wage coders counting hours and lines of code. This is how the end of the era of proprietary software (NOK, MSFT, ORCL, SAP, even AAPL) will look like.
- josephagoss 14y ago
  Except that Apple and Google are some of the main open source developers behind WebKit. Of course Opera has been outgunned.
  - dschiptsov 14y ago
    This is complicated. Google tries to create (or emulate) something like community of individual engineers which rests on principles like "do no evil" or whatever. An order of some kind. It works. So, we could say that contributions are of individuals, not of Google. Even if contributors get paid for full-time, it is their own intention in the first place. At least it is what they want things to look like. As for Apple, there are probably just programmers on a payroll. Apple has a different culture. It is a Steve's workshop, where they "invent" things, or whatever they think these days.
spleeder 14y ago
This is great news! I've always loved Opera for its features, but really disliked the rendering engine.
jbrooksuk 14y ago
I noticed that Argos in the UK uses Opera as the browser or the touch screen interfaces, everything seems to render real nice on there, but Webkit does a far superior job in regards to standards.
_pmf_ 14y ago
Welcome monoculture. It's really amazing how Opera could keep up with the rest for so long, though.
- supercoder 14y ago
  IE and Firefox still exist.
  - bzbarsky 14y ago
    IE does not exist on mobile (though they're trying). Firefox is working on it, but it's an uphill battle. "mobile" sites are overwhelmingly coded to be WebKit-only.
rimantas 14y ago
To all who want to compare webkit being dominant with IE: don't. IE was closed source, and most important of all: it was not developed for a long time after IE6. WebKit development is very active, there are several companies involved and there is still a lot of work they are willing to do in bringing it forward.
- furyofantares 14y ago
  Yeah, as I remember IE6 was actually a pretty good browser when it came out. I believe the real problem was it didn't get updated often enough, and even when it did get updated you couldn't count on users to take the updates, so we got stuck with it for years when everything else was making progress. WebKit gets updated all the time and at least on the desktop you can count on users to get updates to their browsers pretty quickly.
andrewl-hn 14y ago
Opera value preposition was in that they provided a complete solution (rendering engine, network stack, filesystem integration, security, customizable UI, etc.) People and companies often picked up WebKit for their hardware platform without realizing how much stuff is there besides the renderer itself. As a result, they had to spend more time on porting the rest of the stack and were late to market. That's, for example, what happened to Nokia with Symbian Webkit and their clone of Mini. Opera provided SDK and offered custom development services around their platform for a good price. Honestly, I don't think that their business model would suffer much because of the switch. The primary benefit of Presto are very modest hardware requirements. It can run on almost every hardware platform (even something that doesn't have a proper port of Linux core and GCC). That used to be pretty important in 1999, in 2005 and even in 2009, but in recent years it gets a lot cheaper to grab a good enough ARM core for your device, slap either a small Linux kernel, or even Android on top of it; rather than having a dedicated team of engineers struggling with something that barely runs an odd build of Watcom C compiler. Opera was always moving against the mainstream. They optimized for worst hardware while it was getting better. They optimized for limited bandwidth with Mini while network speeds were rapidly increasing. They optimized for memory consumption with Futhark while Mozilla and Google were busy breaking JavaScript speed records. None of that were bad moves per se, but this company is very different from its competitors. Maybe that's the main reason why it survived and has been moderately successful during all these years. As a result, their userbase also moved over time. They got popular in Easter Europe in late 90s, moved to South East Asia and South America in the middle of 00th, and now are very popular in Africa. They used to be pretty big on desktop, then moved to mobile, and now to embedded and devices market. I remember seeing a number of blog posts where web developers dismissed the importance of Opera, saying that only Russians and people from Africa are using it and they are not the ones who click on ads and make purchases. Wbedevs criticized poor developer tools, poor graphic performance, weird bugs. Google always tried to persuade Opera users to switch (http://my.opera.com/ODIN/blog/google-browser-sniffing-and-the-open-web http://my.opera.com/ODIN/blog/google-browser-sniffing-and-th...), Yahoo pulled it from their Grade Browser Support (http://www.yuiblog.com/blog/2009/10/16/gbs-update-2009q4/ http://www.yuiblog.com/blog/2009/10/16/gbs-update-2009q4/), John Resig's slide got picked up by masses (http://ejohn.org/images/cost-benefit.png http://ejohn.org/images/cost-benefit.png). One thing where Opera shines is a UI innovations. When Chome was released I counted about 30 big and small things that they wisely borrowed from Opera UI. That was almost five years ago and Opera was moving fast, too. Mouse gestures, broad customizability, passionate users and some of the greatest people working in the company. I'm pretty certain that Opera's future is bright and shiny! ---- Former Opera employee and devoted user, speaking for myself, obviously.
meerita 14y ago
As I stated on the other thread: It's a wise move for Opera. Now they can hire webkit-engineers from anywere without heavy training on their own private model.
astrojoy 14y ago
Question: Where are the HN moderators? They are quick to hellban users but allow Opera to get the top 3 positions on HN's front page? Opera is a browser and a company not to be trusted IMO. Never do mission-critical work with this sketchy software. I've given Opera plenty of chances and its always flaked out on me in the weirdest ways. This browser also had the habit of mysteriously becoming my default browser without me actually doing it. That's when I could no longer even allow it to be installed on my system. Sorry to be a wet blanket, but I had to share this in case anyone wants a different perspective.
- rospaya 14y ago
  I agree. We should delete all posts about software astrojoy doesn't like. That's what mods are for.
neya 14y ago
From a designer's perspective - I used to be a hardcore Opera user (as a regular consumer) till Opera 10, mainly because of the beautiful inbuilt download manager and the smoothness of their usability. However, for professional work and testing - The only three browsers I use for testing these days are Chrome, Firefox and IE 9+. I never used to consider Opera because, for MY website, the traffic from opera would be really negligible to make it worth the effort getting something right on their browser, though Opera would 99% of the times be almost as perfect as chrome, unlike IE. Now, this move only makes designers' lives easier, needless to say. I'm just waiting for the day when Microsoft would put down their pride of using a stinky, inconsistent rendering engine and move to Webkit, just like Opera and that day would be the start of a new era - Where designers can focus on getting their designs right, than focusing on how to get them right on various browsers. Cheers Opera, Great move!
tomelders 14y ago
I'll admit to being ignorant of Opera for far too long, and only really considering it by including an -o- variant in my css vendor prefixes. But (rightly or wrongly) this news does mean I'll give Opera some serious consideration. If it's Webkit, I can use it with confidence and if Opera's developer tools are better than Chrome or Safari, then it will become my browser of choice. I doubt I'm the only person thinking this way. So that's one more reason this could be a great move for Opera.
eekee 14y ago
There's one thing I can't stand in many of these comments: The blithe assumption that just because something is open-source, it -- and any fork of it -- could be maintained. I can't emphasise enough how wrong this is. Look aorund you in the open-source world. Do you see dozens of forks of every worthwhile project? Hardly! The greatest diversity is probably that between Linux distributions, and for the most part they're only trying to make all the packages play nicely with each other. Maintaining any software that's even half as complex as webkit, (or half as complex as any modern browser engine needs to be,) requires a ridiculous amount of work. Each fork would need to be supported by many people, each of which would have to be convinced that the ideas of one innovator are worth supporting. Then what happens is the really worthwhile ideas are often very hard to explain, while ideas which can be made to sound wonderful and which attract much help may be of very poor quality.
jimsteinhart 14y ago
In contrast to what developers might think, this is bad for the Open Web which is based on several competing and thriving implementations.
chimpoo 14y ago
makes sense
kmfrk 14y ago
As someone who has used Opera for over ten years - probably 15 - and still does, Opera has become an awful browser over the last year or so. Opera used to be superior to other browsers, because it offered a full feature solution - a perfect alternative to Firefox - and it is still the only browser with native tab stacking. It also used to be the fastest browser for people with an assload of active tabs (hell, the only working browser to that end), and a browser with a decent syncing system. Both of those two are no longer the case; the browser is sluggish as hell - I even have to shut it down now and then, because it hogs so much bandwidth - and the Sync feature is awful (just as it is on Chrome). There was a time where the link.opera.com website didn't work for something like two or three years(!), and I still can't sync between my Windows desktop and MacBook Air running Mountain lion. A good sync feature is one of the biggest feature that could literally make me switch to just about any web browser. As Chrome's is no better than Opera's - managing the bookmarks locally is an awful experience on Chrome - and porting will be a pain, I am not in a rush to switch. Opera feels great to use in many ways - it just has so many great shortcuts, and the support for rel="next" on paginated sites is still huge. Opera keeps innovating and will always do, but it paradoxically keeps ruining its core value proposition in favour of an update schedule that breaks more than it fixes. Don't ask me, just look at community forums where people are sticking with Opera in spite of what it actually is now. I don't know why it's gotten so bad. Maybe the employees are just tired of working on Opera. It's just such a crying shame for those of us who've used it for for over a decade. And Chrome still isn't good enough to tide us over.
- 5h 14y ago
  Not that I disagree with your post, especially the rel="next" part, but I wonder what the problem with syncing is when using chrome & signed into a google account? ... it does the job well for me over 4 or so devices.
  - kmfrk 14y ago
    It switches between not pushing the syncing at all (I never managed to get bookmark sync working on iOS) and garbling my bookmarks in all sorts of folder and file tree permutations. It's entirely possible that I have lost bookmarks to this, but I wouldn't know from the utter clusterfuck of it all. Speaking of rel="next", it is an incredibly sad state of affairs that sites such as Daring Fireball can't even be bothered to use it, just because other browsers aren't using what is so obviously a treasure to web browsing. Opera even wanted to use this for swipe left-right navigation on touch-based devices as evidenced in a presentation years old now.
ponyous 14y ago
I HAVE BEEN WAITING FOR THIS FOR TOO LONG. Sorry but I literary have screamed in front of pc.
deleted 14y ago
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dave1010uk 14y ago
I'd like to know what the pros and cons of Opera switching to WebKit instead of Gecko are. Was Gecko ever a possibility?
- d4n3 14y ago
  Opera makes most of its revenue on mobile, and these days, mobile web = webkit. I don't think gecko was ever a serious choice for them.
rurounijones 14y ago
Is there any talk of open-sourcing the presto engine? Even if it were not to be actively developed by engineers; just having the code out there would be good for academic purposes or "This is another way of how it was done" archiving. It would be a crying shame for the presto code to fade into properietary obscurity
ErikAugust 14y ago
This is a major change in Belarus! http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/11/why-is-belarus-the-only-country-where-opera-is-the-most-popular-browser/265406/ http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/11/why-is...
DanBC 14y ago
This thread feels like people didn't learn from all the best viewed in netscape or best viewed in IE terrible sites from early 2000s. [BEST VIEWED IN WEBKIT] or [BEST VIEWED IN GECKO] would suck.
dgesang 14y ago
After reading some comments here I come to the conclusion that (too) many web developers are just a bunch of opportunistic ignorant hypocrites. On the one hand they repeatedly state that constantly expanding variety of HTML9 technologies[1] is THE best thing that could have ever happen to the Internet and that there is nothing worse than mono culture. On the other hand they do not seem to be willing to even consider testing their webapps with a browser with a market share below 10%, because it's just not that important, and embrace the overall greatness of Chrome/Webkit and that it should be the only browser we should develop for/with. [1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5206211 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5206211
- crazygringo 14y ago
  Yup! After all, web developers are individual people with their own opinions, not a monoculture. It's not hypocritical when different members of a group hold contradictory opinions. But if you open your mind a little, you'll also see that the two opinions can also be totally compatible, just dependent on the context. For example, expanding "HTML9" (ha!) can be great for exploring, prototyping, experimenting, where a monoculture is bad and harms innovation. While only >10%-share browsers can be worth commercially developing for, because of resource constraints. In other words, ideally, there would be a "polyculture" in innovation and experimentation, that would constantly funnel into a "monoculture" in actual final standards. Of course, that's hard to establish and maintain in practice, but you can see how they're just different perspectives.
  - dgesang 14y ago
    While only >10%-share browsers can be worth commercially developing for That's one problem: many web developers program for browsers, not standards. In other words, ideally, there would be a "polyculture" in innovation and experimentation, that would constantly funnel into a "monoculture" in actual final standards. Yes, and IMHO that is what happens to browser rendering engines atm. Everyone agrees/complies to one technology and by doing so it becomes a de facto standard. Then new approaches for new problems can be taken from there, without reinventing the wheel. But this also creates room for alternatives to rise, so we are back to multiculturism. :) E.g. replacing JS with some other language would be such a new alternative. Open-Source-Lua-Presto, imagine that! ;)
CrankyBear 14y ago
Here's the real link: http://my.opera.com/ODIN/blog/300-million-users-and-move-to-webkit http://my.opera.com/ODIN/blog/300-million-users-and-move-to-...
CrankyBear 14y ago
Here's the real link: http://my.opera.com/ODIN/blog/300-million-users-and-move-to-webkit http://my.opera.com/ODIN/blog/300-million-users-and-move-to-...
halo 14y ago
Apple and Google managed to do what Microsoft never could and make it unprofitable to create a commercial web browser. A sad day.
sergiotapia 14y ago
Dragonfly is in my opinion better than Webkits inspector. I love using it. Does anyone know what will happen to Dragonfly after the switch?
- iopq 14y ago
  Dragonfly is tightly bound to Presto, so it's going away unless they rewrite it. And so far, according to the tweets, it looks like it's going away.
- iopq 14y ago
  Dragonfly is tightly bound to Presto, so it's going away unless they rewrite it. And so far, according to the tweets, it looks like it's going away.
- iopq 14y ago
  Dragonfly is tightly bound to Presto, so it's going away unless they rewrite it. And so far, according to the tweets, it looks like it's going away.
hnriot 14y ago
I drive past opera software every morning, if it wasn't for the sign on their building I'd never think about them. They were popular a long while back, but now? Does anyone still use opera. If so why? It was behind in tech and for any serious web development it didn't matter, chrome, Firefox were the two that get used. Safari obviously but mainly for iOS platforms. The number of comments here surprises me, I would have thought this irrelevant news.
snarfy 14y ago
Are they going to open source Presto?
United857 14y ago
If they are using WebKit, Chromium, and V8 -- what areas can they add uniqueness to so that it's not just a Opera-branded version of Chrome?
homosaur 14y ago
Is there any benefit to still having multiple rendering engines out there? Should IE move to webkit? Firefox? Should prefixes now be -ms-webkit and -opera-webkit so browser makers can still innovate?
ehamberg 14y ago
https://twitter.com/SteveStreza/status/301725620172386304 https://twitter.com/SteveStreza/status/301725620172386304: New hobby: Inspecting the source of blog posts complaining about Opera adopting WebKit and finding -webkit prefixes without -o equivalents.
- dylan-m 14y ago
  My new hobby: Inspecting the source of blog posts that act like prefixed CSS styles are healthy standards that must be conformed to, and finding -o and -webkit prefixes without -dylans-browser equivalents. Less sarcastic version: This is only a problem if the developer neglects to include an unprefixed version, and even that is perfectly excusable if the syntax remains up in the air (like box-shadow was for a while). As soon as the style is in a standard, it works in the version of Opera that supports that standard. There is absolutely no reason a web developer should be expected to implement nonstandard code for a specific browser, and when it happens one must keep in mind: the standard isn't finished, it could break some day, and it needs to be closely watched and regularly tested. If you are using prefixed styles without testing each of them, you're considerably worse than the person who isn't using them at all.
runn1ng 14y ago
I see this as a win for open source software. (Or "free software". I never know.) Opera never open-sourced its rendering engine Presto, keeping it as a jewel of sorts. On the other hand, Apple always shared the WebKit code, so Google could come, fork it and make it better. Opera thought that keeping Presto proprietary will give them advantage in the market. Instead, it made it obsolete and irrelevant.
- dylan-m 14y ago
  I totally agree with you here, but I just need to correct you on something. Webkit is based on KHTML, which was available with the LGPL license. Of course, it's much more Webkit than KHTML at this point, but it isn't so much that Apple shared the Webkit code as they wisely forked a mature open source project and followed its license ;)
- mikaelj 14y ago
  Apple shared? Get with the program: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KHTML http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KHTML
bvcqw 14y ago
Hope this doesn't lead to layoffs at Opera.
marizmelo 14y ago
It was about time. Webkit is becoming the de facto browser engine. People will say that this kills competition, but competition is just good when brings better alternatives, Opera is not the case.
rdl 14y ago
Now we just have to wait for Firefox to adopt WebKit, and...Lynx?
networked 14y ago
Their move is understandable, but it'll be something of a pity if this affects Opera's performance. From personal experience I can say that Opera is pretty much the only current browser that can deliver a combination of acceptable speed and rendering quality on really outdated x86 hardware. I have tested it on a ThinkPad T23 with a Pentium III-M CPU and 1024 MB RAM running Ubuntu 10.04, as well as an early Pentium 4-M Windows XP-equipped laptop we needed to set up as a kind of an info kiosk at work. Opera felt way more responsive than Firefox, Chromium or even Midori on both. If Opera switching to WebKit makes it no longer reasonably usable on this hardware it would mean replacing those machines sooner rather than later. It's not that big of a deal, but the costs can build up with volume and I'm sure we aren't going to be the only ones affected. Edit: rephrased for clarity.
g8oz 14y ago
As someone who has been using Opera since the 90's, this makes me sad.
acqq 14y ago
Opera users were bullied by Google for years. Even when some Google's site would work perfectly in Opera when the Opera would identify itself as IE or Firefox, Google would sometimes even reject user's attempt to access some of their sites. To the users of Opera, it was obvious that it was done intentionally -- on Google scale, they were bullying up to 300 million users who mostly selected Opera exactly because it runs better on the less CPU-powerful hardware. I write this on the Sony notebook made in 2002, which has very slow processor for today's standards but I had the pleasure to enjoy the hi-res 1400x1050 IPS screen during all the years when you were only able to buy TN on the notebooks http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p8MO-XaCZ_8 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p8MO-XaCZ_8 Opera was my savior through the years.
jamese 14y ago
Now if only Microsoft would do the same with Internet Explorer!
Dylanlacey 14y ago
We already had a monoculture; Opera not using Webkit wasn't preventing this because as you can see in the comments in this page, most non-Opera users considered its existence silly and never catered for it. I love Opera. It's been my main browser since I started using the 'net (1996). But developers have always ignored it, always considered it not worth developing for because "there's no users". They didn't hold out against the monoculture, they just did their own thing for a while until they got tired of it. And I think they are tired. They're talking about finally impacting the future of the web and being able to make widespread contributions. I think as a company they just love the Internet and want to be able to make it as awesome as possible for as many people as possible, and Presto wasn't allowing them to do that.
nevster 14y ago
Can anyone help me understand that 300 million number? Taking a rough estimate of 2% market share from here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers, if all 7 billion people in the world used the internet, it still only works out at 140 million people.
itsbits 14y ago
I hope Firefox and IE do the same..Atleast in HTML5 we have common engine...
DigitalSea 14y ago
I don't understand why people are so outraged by this... Webkit has proven itself as a worthy browser engine, as a web developer Webkit is responsible for bringing back the fun into web development (for me at least) and lets face it how many developers even test their sites in Opera any more with exception of a few? This is great news because lets face it, Webkit is one of the best engines out there, period. That's not to say that Opera is a bad browser, it was ahead of its time in many aspects. Optimised for lower hardware specs, optimised for limited bandwidth, mouse gestures and a really nice & clean user interface. But you have to know when to cut your loses and, "if you can't beat them, join them".
- msoad 14y ago
  WebKit is not a "browser engine".
  - DigitalSea 14y ago
    Layout engine, browser engine. Same thing to me. No need to nitpick.
SirPulse 14y ago
Does this not create a webkit monoculture? Find a security flaw in website and suddenly two thirds of browsers are vulnerable.
ishansharma 14y ago
Great. Opera was my primary browser before Google Chrome. I tried sticking to it but it was always left behind. Then as I dived into Google's services more and more, it was clear that Opera wasn't a consideration for Google. Want to Drag and Drop something in GMail, not possible! Any other cool features on many other websites, no! Now that they are switching to Webkit, I hope Opera gets support for all these features.
glennos 14y ago
Sounds like great news. Hopefully those extra resources can go into returning the GUI to the best in the business and at that point, I look forward to returning. In the meantime, Chrome will keep me warm.

938 points by bdash 14y ago

octix 14y ago

It's always good to have choices, however I still cannot understand the advantages of Opera over it's open source siblings...

wooptoo 14y ago

While I agree that webkit is a great piece of software, what happens when everybody switches to webkit? Will Google/Apple/developers simply ignore other engines and let it become the new IE of the decade?

nkuttler 14y ago

"Opera is for people who appreciate choice, and we are going to make it even easier to choose Opera in the future." That's a nice spin. Less rendering engines, more choice!

szalansky 14y ago
Yes and no. Less work for frontend guys I believe. More choice for you, because you can get the same decent looking pages (theoretically) with a different UI of the browser. And, IMO, here is where Opera wins - their UI is superior to Chrome's and Safari's.
- rplnt 14y ago
  Its ability to configure basically anything from user interface is far above any other browser. Chrome is a browser that I recommend to parents. It has dumbed down interface, zero options - perfect for average majority. It is still powerful when combined with dozens of extensions, but it still can't compete with Opera in this area. It's like KDE vs Gnome3 if that makes more sense for someone.
  - lucian1900 14y ago
    I like Chrome's UI. There's almost nothing it doesn't do that I'd want. I could totally do without extensions if I had to, but they are nice to have.
  - LeonidasXIV 14y ago
    My Firefox feels like Vim, I suppose Firefox wins in the configurability department, at least when you include plugins. Of course, only desktop Firefox.

andybak 14y ago

Mixed emotions here. I think it makes every sense for Opera to do this. The cost of maintaining their own rendering engine must have been huge and the advantages it brought were slender. It's also good to have another major player contributing to webkit. On the other hand it's a step closer to an unhealthy monoculture in rendering engines. It's already the case for the mobile web that people are starting to define standards as 'whatever webkit does'.

fpgeek 14y ago
I wonder if, ironically, rendering engine diversity is something where the slow, incoherent Android update mess is actually a good thing. To the extent that "whatever WebKit does" gets defined as "whatever ugly, lowest-common-denominator thing that works in the stock Gingerbread browser" that might help other rendering engines stay in the race. In other words, legacy Android browsers might help by slowing down the spread of new WebKit-specific features (that they also don't support).
goldfeld 14y ago
Well, webkit being something open and contributed to by many players in collaboration, couldn't we think of it as part of the standard itself? There isn't some evil monopoly to be had in only having one rendering engine, as much as there isn't so in having web standard technologies such as HTML5 and CSS3. I think this is right on for Opera, it has always set itself apart by it's usability and features and I think browsers need to get innovating more on that front.
- gcp 14y ago
  The problem of having the standard defined by an implementation is that it makes it almost impossible to have another implementation. This is fine if we agree here and now in 2013 that WebKit is the only rendering engine we'll ever need. That just doesn't seem like a smart bet to make. Opera was in some ways better than the WebKit browsers on mobile devices, except for broken Webkit only sites. That ain't going to get better now.
  - 14y ago

wluu 14y ago

Interesting... I wonder if they'd now consider opening up their browser engine as an open source project? Not for any reason other than, if someone in the future wanted to. They could fork it and extend it and perhaps make something awesome. Nothing may actually happen, but you never know if you don't give it a chance to...

bdash 14y ago

In an email to the WebKit development mailing list[1] Håkon Wium Lie, the Opera CTO, mentioned that they've had engineers working on WebKit for a while now, and they'll soon be contributing their work on multi-column layout to the WebKit project. [1]: https://lists.webkit.org/pipermail/webkit-dev/2013-February/023820.html https://lists.webkit.org/pipermail/webkit-dev/2013-February/...

bdash 14y ago
And their first contribution is already attached to https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=15553 https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=15553!

szalansky 14y ago

At last. Opera used to be my favorite browser, thanks to their sophisticated UI. But I gave it up when HTML5 started coming in. I believe it had problems with Javascripts too. Is mobile Opera very different from the desktop one? I see many Android users using it and being happy.

pornel 14y ago
The great irony is that Opera has started the HTML5 effort: http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/2005-09-01/ http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/2005-09-01/ back then it was called Web Forms 2 and Web Applications 1.0.

pestaa 14y ago

WebKit was the reason why I started using other browsers -- I'm very excited to see it in Opera! I wonder what'll happen to Dragonfly, their integrated development platform? It was a neat project, although arguably inferior to Firebug/Chrome Dev Tools in many areas. Good luck Opera!

mcrittenden 14y ago
I was wondering that too. I assume Dragonfly will die and they will switch to WebKit/Chromium's dev tools instead. If that happens, I very much hope that they will rebuild Dragonfly's unique bits for WebKit's dev tools and submit them as patches, so nothing of value is lost.

spicyj 14y ago

And then there were three. Which will happen first, the death of one of (WebKit, Gecko, Trident) or a new popular rendering engine not related to any of them?

kibwen 14y ago
High hopes for Servo[1], but it'll still be years yet until it's able to challenge any of those three. Webkit2[2] will probably be ready sooner, but it's less of a radical departure than Servo's intended to be. [1] https://github.com/mozilla/servo https://github.com/mozilla/servo [2] http://trac.webkit.org/wiki/WebKit2 http://trac.webkit.org/wiki/WebKit2
- bdash 14y ago
  WebKit2 is a new API layer on top of WebKit, not a new browser engine. It has been used by Safari since v5.1.
  - kibwen 14y ago
    Are you sure about that? When I read quotes like "web content (JavaScript, HTML, layout, etc) lives in a separate process from the application UI", that conjures images of a rather drastic and fundamental change. I'm not sure how you'd achieve that with just a new API layer.
    - bdash 14y ago
      Yes, I'm sure. The same core rendering engine, known as WebCore, is shared between both WebKit1 and WebKit2 on OS X. WebKit1 is used by most applications that use a WebView to display web content, while WebKit2 is used by Safari. The different API layers set up different delegate callbacks for WebCore so that they can tweak the behavior to fit their architecture (single process vs separate web and UI processes).
    - gcp 14y ago
      Firefox for Android does this, and it's not like the underlying Gecko engine is different.

gl0wa 14y ago

Now it's time for IE to switch to WebKit as well. Also, they should make it available for all versions of Windows.

yuhong 14y ago
Well, it's MSHTML rendering engine is used by many other apps too, for one thing.

grandpoobah 14y ago

Does this mean they'll be using V8 too?

devongovett 14y ago
Yes it says so here http://my.opera.com/ODIN/blog/300-million-users-and-move-to-webkit http://my.opera.com/ODIN/blog/300-million-users-and-move-to-...
bdash 14y ago
The press release notes that they're using the Chromium port of WebKit, so it's very likely that they'll be using V8 as a JavaScript engine.
szalansky 14y ago
I'm curious too! I think Javascript in Opera was a bigger problem than HTML. A year ago I worked on an app with heavy JS frontend and frontend guys told that they can't make it work properly on Opera.
- zobzu 14y ago
  Yeah, I think they're actually switching for V8 more than anything. Their HTML layout engine was/is pretty much fine.
  - bdash 14y ago
    At http://my.opera.com/ODIN/blog/300-million-users-and-move-to-webkit http://my.opera.com/ODIN/blog/300-million-users-and-move-to-... they state they're switching because they feel it is a waste of resources to maintain their own rendering engine. I'd be surprised if the JavaScript engine was a big factor in their decision. The vast majority of "JavaScript" problems encountered by web developers are either problems with the DOM implementation in general. A smaller portion are in the binding between the DOM implementation and the JavaScript language, and fewer still are in the JavaScript engine itself.
    - 14y ago

daGrevis 14y ago

All I can say is "Woohoo!".

lordlarm 14y ago

I worked for Opera the summer of 2010 and I've also been using the browser the last couple of years. Compared to Google, Apple, Microsoft - it is important to understand that Opera is a small, very small, company. I'm very happy to see their resources better used to innovating and improve their exiting product, rather than trying to catching up to the other browsers. A big loss for the general state of rendering platforms though, with now only Webkit, Trident and Gecko as serious contenders.

Arelius 14y ago
It breaks my heart to know that Presto is going to most likely be left to bitrot in some SCM somewhere. But on the same note, I understand that using webkit will be better for Opera as a browser.
- fpgeek 14y ago
  I wonder if Opera will consider open-sourcing it, or if it (typically) has too many problematic dependencies for that to be worthwhile.
  - Arelius 14y ago
    Considering they are switching to an open source rendering engine, I think there is likelihood they would have open-sourced presto already if that was possible. I suspect that like much proprietary software, there are too many licensed dependencies. It's a pity, because it'd be very cool to get a source dump of the final presto engine. Even if it was never integrated into a new browser, the historical value alone would be significant.
    - rplnt 14y ago
      Opera's response to Open-Sourcing always was, that they would have no business that way. Apple doesn't care I believe, Google/Microsoft are in it for search and ads, Firefox isn't a business (and they make all money from search I think). While Opera makes a lot of money from search, they have a lot of OEM deals that they are afraid to lose. So if there was no legal constraint, Presto could see day of light. If nothing else, then in patches to webkit :)

afshinmeh 14y ago

Seems a great news but I can't really understand the benefits and differents between Gecko and Webkit, can someone say?

qznc 14y ago
For the normal user it does not matter. It just matters that there are competing engines. As long as there are multiple implementations, we will have a formal standard for HTML and Co. If e.g. everybody (Microsoft,Mozilla) would adopt WebKit, then nobody would bother to extend the HTML standard. Just implement it in WebKit. Soon, HTML will be a mess like Office Open XML.
jacques_chester 14y ago
For historical reasons, Webkit has turned out to be much easier to work on than Gecko. With Gecko you get heavy-duty OOP module system riding shotgun (XPCOM). That seems to be a sufficiently high barrier to contributors that only Mozilla are using Gecko with any seriousness. Webkit has evolved out of a different history as a sorta-kinda standalone component of KDE to be much more approachable to outside contributions. Since Apple forked it from KHTML it's gone from strength to strength.

viseztrance 14y ago

Great news for Opera. Unfortunately this is another reason for developers to ignore other browsers and use proprietary webkit prefixes.

Arelius 14y ago
I'd generally agree. But my impression is that Opera had small enough market share that people overwhelmingly ignored it anyways.

drinchev 14y ago

As far as I hate monopoly and the things that happened years ago with IE6, I'm a bit afraid of what's going on here. I really appreciate the fact that coding a website with webkit bugs in mind will automatically include support of Opera browser now, but does this mean that the whole web will start to code exclusively for webkit engine? This doesn't feel good. I'm afraid webkit will start to dictate features and their bugs-workarounds such as [1] will remain untouched for years. [1]: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/14773587/possible-or-misused-feature-overflowhidden-weirdness/14773817#14773817 http://stackoverflow.com/questions/14773587/possible-or-misu...

Arelius 14y ago
Besides the fact that I think Firefox is now actually a really great piece of software, this is a primary reason why I continue to use Firefox while everyone else in the office uses chrome.
- drinchev 14y ago
  Yes, you are right, I really love to hear that. But as a webdeveloper my first task after I write some code is to test it in a webkit browser. Webkit is everywhere iPad, iPhone, Chrome, Safari, ( now Opera ). I think bad developers will start to exclude other engines support if percentage of non-webkit browsers goes very low. And since a lot of websites are coded from amateurs ( there's nothing wrong to this ) there will be more and more webkit-optimized content. That's sad!
  - gcp 14y ago
    Note that there's some fragmentation in WebKit as well. I think that developers that assume it will make their lives a lot easier will be slightly disappointed in the end.
  - jaytaylor 14y ago
    >> I think bad developers will start to exclude other engines support if percentage of non-webkit browsers goes very low. Bad developers are already ignoring everything except whatever single browser they [might have] tested in. This move certainly is unsettling, but I think you can come up with a better argument about why.

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

blaabjerg 14y ago

Interesting move, but I guess it was pretty much inevitable considering how much WebKit has been surging ahead the last couple of years. This might be wishful thinking, but I hope they'll expand the desktop team and spend more resources on UI and UX now that the UI basically is the only killer feature on the desktop. I'd love to see Opera on the innovation forefront once again!

jasonkester 14y ago

Smart move. I don't know a single web dev who tests on Opera anymore. I personally stopped worrying about it for any of my products when it hit 1.6% market share, and that was five years ago. They're essentially not supported by anybody, and haven't been for a long time. ... But that's never mattered, since they have always known it. And they went out of their way to make sure they rendered exactly like the dominant browser. For the longest time, they'd match Internet Explorer quirk for quirk, so if you supported that you supported Opera. Now they see that Chrome is going to win, so they're switching to copying Chrome instead. And since Chrome has a nice drop-in "Chrome in a box" rendering engine they can use, it's going to be a lot easier to pull off this time around. They'll continue to be the browser that nobody cares about (aside from six people who are no doubt here in this thread somewhere), but your site will probably render fine on it. EDIT: Looks like those aforementioned Opera devotees have arrived. This comment went from 6 points and the top slot down to 1 point in the last ten minutes. Funny, since it's not actually an anti-Opera comment (or of course the sort of thing that down-votes here are usually reserved for).

ohwp 14y ago
"I don't know a single web dev who tests on Opera anymore." Hi, I'm a dev who always develop for Opera. The reason: if it works in Opera it almost is working in all other browsers. And I ofcourse like Opera very much. I think it has one of the best interfaces and toolsets. "They'll continue to be the browser that nobody cares about." This is a very stupid statement. 300 million monthly users care about Opera. The HN "community" != the rest of the world.
- hkolk 14y ago
  Working for one of the biggest sites in the netherlands: 0.31% is Opera's market share at our site. It's not on our supported browsers list
  - Freestyler_3 14y ago
    That's probably just me.

ed_blackburn 14y ago

Here's a scenario: As a network provider I wish to subsidise the hardware on my tariffs further still. I can shape traffic, sell advertising and analytic's to achieve this. Now if only I could get a capable proxy service compatible with the common browsers on iOS and Android. Is Opera's core proposition a browser or a service? What differentiates them from their competitors? I read this announcement as a candid admission that they can compete better with their proxy service than with their browser. I suspect the future of Opera is as a SaaS proxy that happens to have a client ready too. A proxy for shaping or sniffing (mobile) traffic has many advantages to those in emerging markets and those who wish to push advertising down our throats cough cough Facebook and Google.

lazyjones 14y ago

That's going to make them less competitive in my opinion, although it's an understandable move considering their size. I am wondering about the timing though - now that HTML5 is finally a standard and browser developers can stabilize their rendering instead of playing catch-up with the latest draft features, it's a bit late to switch. They would have benefited more by switching 2-3 years ago.

micheljansen 14y ago

Wow, that's a huge step. Being the #4 rendering engine was really hurting Opera though. Most people use WebKit or Gecko during development and then make it work in IE as well, but never get to Opera. One of the main reasons I stopped using Opera for browsing was that, despite having some great features (always loved their gestures), so many sites just didn't work properly. I hope this will only make them contribute more to pushing the web forward, as they have always done.

Aissen 14y ago

Three weeks ago, they let clues out: http://www.pocket-lint.com/news/49375/opera-ice-new-webkit-browser http://www.pocket-lint.com/news/49375/opera-ice-new-webkit-b... http://www.theverge.com/2013/1/19/3892646/opera-shows-off-new-webkit-based-ice-mobile-browser http://www.theverge.com/2013/1/19/3892646/opera-shows-off-ne... (those were posted here but didn't get any discussion so I won't bother linking)

EGreg 14y ago

A win for web developers, in my humble opinion, as the rendering engines converge. With open source projects like WebKit, why do we need so many proprietary engines competing with each other? It creates more target environments for all the web developers and designers around the world to repetitively test. This is a great example of how platforms, when open sourced, can beat proprietary silos which fuel the engine of capitalism. While the competition between proprietary silos, together with the copyright + patent protections they require, does drive innovation forward, it does it at great cost (in the amount of litigation required to protect the IP, in the lack of interoperability, and the increased cost for everyone producing for multiple platforms). By contrast, an open source project can develop much more similar targets that have incentive to interoperate and accept contributions from others. For example Linux variants, and now WebKit and its derivatives.

dschiptsov 14y ago

This is how it works - open source quality created by enthusiastic community wins proprietary crap produced by wage coders counting hours and lines of code. This is how the end of the era of proprietary software (NOK, MSFT, ORCL, SAP, even AAPL) will look like.

josephagoss 14y ago
Except that Apple and Google are some of the main open source developers behind WebKit. Of course Opera has been outgunned.
- dschiptsov 14y ago
  This is complicated. Google tries to create (or emulate) something like community of individual engineers which rests on principles like "do no evil" or whatever. An order of some kind. It works. So, we could say that contributions are of individuals, not of Google. Even if contributors get paid for full-time, it is their own intention in the first place. At least it is what they want things to look like. As for Apple, there are probably just programmers on a payroll. Apple has a different culture. It is a Steve's workshop, where they "invent" things, or whatever they think these days.

spleeder 14y ago

This is great news! I've always loved Opera for its features, but really disliked the rendering engine.

jbrooksuk 14y ago

I noticed that Argos in the UK uses Opera as the browser or the touch screen interfaces, everything seems to render real nice on there, but Webkit does a far superior job in regards to standards.

_pmf_ 14y ago

Welcome monoculture. It's really amazing how Opera could keep up with the rest for so long, though.

supercoder 14y ago
IE and Firefox still exist.
- bzbarsky 14y ago
  IE does not exist on mobile (though they're trying). Firefox is working on it, but it's an uphill battle. "mobile" sites are overwhelmingly coded to be WebKit-only.

rimantas 14y ago

To all who want to compare webkit being dominant with IE: don't. IE was closed source, and most important of all: it was not developed for a long time after IE6. WebKit development is very active, there are several companies involved and there is still a lot of work they are willing to do in bringing it forward.

furyofantares 14y ago
Yeah, as I remember IE6 was actually a pretty good browser when it came out. I believe the real problem was it didn't get updated often enough, and even when it did get updated you couldn't count on users to take the updates, so we got stuck with it for years when everything else was making progress. WebKit gets updated all the time and at least on the desktop you can count on users to get updates to their browsers pretty quickly.

andrewl-hn 14y ago

Opera value preposition was in that they provided a complete solution (rendering engine, network stack, filesystem integration, security, customizable UI, etc.) People and companies often picked up WebKit for their hardware platform without realizing how much stuff is there besides the renderer itself. As a result, they had to spend more time on porting the rest of the stack and were late to market. That's, for example, what happened to Nokia with Symbian Webkit and their clone of Mini. Opera provided SDK and offered custom development services around their platform for a good price. Honestly, I don't think that their business model would suffer much because of the switch. The primary benefit of Presto are very modest hardware requirements. It can run on almost every hardware platform (even something that doesn't have a proper port of Linux core and GCC). That used to be pretty important in 1999, in 2005 and even in 2009, but in recent years it gets a lot cheaper to grab a good enough ARM core for your device, slap either a small Linux kernel, or even Android on top of it; rather than having a dedicated team of engineers struggling with something that barely runs an odd build of Watcom C compiler. Opera was always moving against the mainstream. They optimized for worst hardware while it was getting better. They optimized for limited bandwidth with Mini while network speeds were rapidly increasing. They optimized for memory consumption with Futhark while Mozilla and Google were busy breaking JavaScript speed records. None of that were bad moves per se, but this company is very different from its competitors. Maybe that's the main reason why it survived and has been moderately successful during all these years. As a result, their userbase also moved over time. They got popular in Easter Europe in late 90s, moved to South East Asia and South America in the middle of 00th, and now are very popular in Africa. They used to be pretty big on desktop, then moved to mobile, and now to embedded and devices market. I remember seeing a number of blog posts where web developers dismissed the importance of Opera, saying that only Russians and people from Africa are using it and they are not the ones who click on ads and make purchases. Wbedevs criticized poor developer tools, poor graphic performance, weird bugs. Google always tried to persuade Opera users to switch (http://my.opera.com/ODIN/blog/google-browser-sniffing-and-the-open-web http://my.opera.com/ODIN/blog/google-browser-sniffing-and-th...), Yahoo pulled it from their Grade Browser Support (http://www.yuiblog.com/blog/2009/10/16/gbs-update-2009q4/ http://www.yuiblog.com/blog/2009/10/16/gbs-update-2009q4/), John Resig's slide got picked up by masses (http://ejohn.org/images/cost-benefit.png http://ejohn.org/images/cost-benefit.png). One thing where Opera shines is a UI innovations. When Chome was released I counted about 30 big and small things that they wisely borrowed from Opera UI. That was almost five years ago and Opera was moving fast, too. Mouse gestures, broad customizability, passionate users and some of the greatest people working in the company. I'm pretty certain that Opera's future is bright and shiny! ---- Former Opera employee and devoted user, speaking for myself, obviously.

meerita 14y ago

As I stated on the other thread: It's a wise move for Opera. Now they can hire webkit-engineers from anywere without heavy training on their own private model.

astrojoy 14y ago

Question: Where are the HN moderators? They are quick to hellban users but allow Opera to get the top 3 positions on HN's front page? Opera is a browser and a company not to be trusted IMO. Never do mission-critical work with this sketchy software. I've given Opera plenty of chances and its always flaked out on me in the weirdest ways. This browser also had the habit of mysteriously becoming my default browser without me actually doing it. That's when I could no longer even allow it to be installed on my system. Sorry to be a wet blanket, but I had to share this in case anyone wants a different perspective.

rospaya 14y ago
I agree. We should delete all posts about software astrojoy doesn't like. That's what mods are for.

neya 14y ago

From a designer's perspective - I used to be a hardcore Opera user (as a regular consumer) till Opera 10, mainly because of the beautiful inbuilt download manager and the smoothness of their usability. However, for professional work and testing - The only three browsers I use for testing these days are Chrome, Firefox and IE 9+. I never used to consider Opera because, for MY website, the traffic from opera would be really negligible to make it worth the effort getting something right on their browser, though Opera would 99% of the times be almost as perfect as chrome, unlike IE. Now, this move only makes designers' lives easier, needless to say. I'm just waiting for the day when Microsoft would put down their pride of using a stinky, inconsistent rendering engine and move to Webkit, just like Opera and that day would be the start of a new era - Where designers can focus on getting their designs right, than focusing on how to get them right on various browsers. Cheers Opera, Great move!

tomelders 14y ago

I'll admit to being ignorant of Opera for far too long, and only really considering it by including an -o- variant in my css vendor prefixes. But (rightly or wrongly) this news does mean I'll give Opera some serious consideration. If it's Webkit, I can use it with confidence and if Opera's developer tools are better than Chrome or Safari, then it will become my browser of choice. I doubt I'm the only person thinking this way. So that's one more reason this could be a great move for Opera.

eekee 14y ago

There's one thing I can't stand in many of these comments: The blithe assumption that just because something is open-source, it -- and any fork of it -- could be maintained. I can't emphasise enough how wrong this is. Look aorund you in the open-source world. Do you see dozens of forks of every worthwhile project? Hardly! The greatest diversity is probably that between Linux distributions, and for the most part they're only trying to make all the packages play nicely with each other. Maintaining any software that's even half as complex as webkit, (or half as complex as any modern browser engine needs to be,) requires a ridiculous amount of work. Each fork would need to be supported by many people, each of which would have to be convinced that the ideas of one innovator are worth supporting. Then what happens is the really worthwhile ideas are often very hard to explain, while ideas which can be made to sound wonderful and which attract much help may be of very poor quality.

jimsteinhart 14y ago

In contrast to what developers might think, this is bad for the Open Web which is based on several competing and thriving implementations.

chimpoo 14y ago

makes sense

kmfrk 14y ago

As someone who has used Opera for over ten years - probably 15 - and still does, Opera has become an awful browser over the last year or so. Opera used to be superior to other browsers, because it offered a full feature solution - a perfect alternative to Firefox - and it is still the only browser with native tab stacking. It also used to be the fastest browser for people with an assload of active tabs (hell, the only working browser to that end), and a browser with a decent syncing system. Both of those two are no longer the case; the browser is sluggish as hell - I even have to shut it down now and then, because it hogs so much bandwidth - and the Sync feature is awful (just as it is on Chrome). There was a time where the link.opera.com website didn't work for something like two or three years(!), and I still can't sync between my Windows desktop and MacBook Air running Mountain lion. A good sync feature is one of the biggest feature that could literally make me switch to just about any web browser. As Chrome's is no better than Opera's - managing the bookmarks locally is an awful experience on Chrome - and porting will be a pain, I am not in a rush to switch. Opera feels great to use in many ways - it just has so many great shortcuts, and the support for rel="next" on paginated sites is still huge. Opera keeps innovating and will always do, but it paradoxically keeps ruining its core value proposition in favour of an update schedule that breaks more than it fixes. Don't ask me, just look at community forums where people are sticking with Opera in spite of what it actually is now. I don't know why it's gotten so bad. Maybe the employees are just tired of working on Opera. It's just such a crying shame for those of us who've used it for for over a decade. And Chrome still isn't good enough to tide us over.

5h 14y ago
Not that I disagree with your post, especially the rel="next" part, but I wonder what the problem with syncing is when using chrome & signed into a google account? ... it does the job well for me over 4 or so devices.
- kmfrk 14y ago
  It switches between not pushing the syncing at all (I never managed to get bookmark sync working on iOS) and garbling my bookmarks in all sorts of folder and file tree permutations. It's entirely possible that I have lost bookmarks to this, but I wouldn't know from the utter clusterfuck of it all. Speaking of rel="next", it is an incredibly sad state of affairs that sites such as Daring Fireball can't even be bothered to use it, just because other browsers aren't using what is so obviously a treasure to web browsing. Opera even wanted to use this for swipe left-right navigation on touch-based devices as evidenced in a presentation years old now.

ponyous 14y ago

I HAVE BEEN WAITING FOR THIS FOR TOO LONG. Sorry but I literary have screamed in front of pc.

deleted 14y ago

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dave1010uk 14y ago

I'd like to know what the pros and cons of Opera switching to WebKit instead of Gecko are. Was Gecko ever a possibility?

d4n3 14y ago
Opera makes most of its revenue on mobile, and these days, mobile web = webkit. I don't think gecko was ever a serious choice for them.

rurounijones 14y ago

Is there any talk of open-sourcing the presto engine? Even if it were not to be actively developed by engineers; just having the code out there would be good for academic purposes or "This is another way of how it was done" archiving. It would be a crying shame for the presto code to fade into properietary obscurity

ErikAugust 14y ago

This is a major change in Belarus! http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/11/why-is-belarus-the-only-country-where-opera-is-the-most-popular-browser/265406/ http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/11/why-is...

DanBC 14y ago

This thread feels like people didn't learn from all the best viewed in netscape or best viewed in IE terrible sites from early 2000s. [BEST VIEWED IN WEBKIT] or [BEST VIEWED IN GECKO] would suck.

dgesang 14y ago

After reading some comments here I come to the conclusion that (too) many web developers are just a bunch of opportunistic ignorant hypocrites. On the one hand they repeatedly state that constantly expanding variety of HTML9 technologies[1] is THE best thing that could have ever happen to the Internet and that there is nothing worse than mono culture. On the other hand they do not seem to be willing to even consider testing their webapps with a browser with a market share below 10%, because it's just not that important, and embrace the overall greatness of Chrome/Webkit and that it should be the only browser we should develop for/with. [1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5206211 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5206211

crazygringo 14y ago
Yup! After all, web developers are individual people with their own opinions, not a monoculture. It's not hypocritical when different members of a group hold contradictory opinions. But if you open your mind a little, you'll also see that the two opinions can also be totally compatible, just dependent on the context. For example, expanding "HTML9" (ha!) can be great for exploring, prototyping, experimenting, where a monoculture is bad and harms innovation. While only >10%-share browsers can be worth commercially developing for, because of resource constraints. In other words, ideally, there would be a "polyculture" in innovation and experimentation, that would constantly funnel into a "monoculture" in actual final standards. Of course, that's hard to establish and maintain in practice, but you can see how they're just different perspectives.
- dgesang 14y ago
  While only >10%-share browsers can be worth commercially developing for That's one problem: many web developers program for browsers, not standards. In other words, ideally, there would be a "polyculture" in innovation and experimentation, that would constantly funnel into a "monoculture" in actual final standards. Yes, and IMHO that is what happens to browser rendering engines atm. Everyone agrees/complies to one technology and by doing so it becomes a de facto standard. Then new approaches for new problems can be taken from there, without reinventing the wheel. But this also creates room for alternatives to rise, so we are back to multiculturism. :) E.g. replacing JS with some other language would be such a new alternative. Open-Source-Lua-Presto, imagine that! ;)

CrankyBear 14y ago

Here's the real link: http://my.opera.com/ODIN/blog/300-million-users-and-move-to-webkit http://my.opera.com/ODIN/blog/300-million-users-and-move-to-...

CrankyBear 14y ago

Here's the real link: http://my.opera.com/ODIN/blog/300-million-users-and-move-to-webkit http://my.opera.com/ODIN/blog/300-million-users-and-move-to-...

halo 14y ago

Apple and Google managed to do what Microsoft never could and make it unprofitable to create a commercial web browser. A sad day.

sergiotapia 14y ago

Dragonfly is in my opinion better than Webkits inspector. I love using it. Does anyone know what will happen to Dragonfly after the switch?

iopq 14y ago
Dragonfly is tightly bound to Presto, so it's going away unless they rewrite it. And so far, according to the tweets, it looks like it's going away.
iopq 14y ago
Dragonfly is tightly bound to Presto, so it's going away unless they rewrite it. And so far, according to the tweets, it looks like it's going away.
iopq 14y ago
Dragonfly is tightly bound to Presto, so it's going away unless they rewrite it. And so far, according to the tweets, it looks like it's going away.

hnriot 14y ago

I drive past opera software every morning, if it wasn't for the sign on their building I'd never think about them. They were popular a long while back, but now? Does anyone still use opera. If so why? It was behind in tech and for any serious web development it didn't matter, chrome, Firefox were the two that get used. Safari obviously but mainly for iOS platforms. The number of comments here surprises me, I would have thought this irrelevant news.

snarfy 14y ago

Are they going to open source Presto?

United857 14y ago

If they are using WebKit, Chromium, and V8 -- what areas can they add uniqueness to so that it's not just a Opera-branded version of Chrome?

homosaur 14y ago

Is there any benefit to still having multiple rendering engines out there? Should IE move to webkit? Firefox? Should prefixes now be -ms-webkit and -opera-webkit so browser makers can still innovate?

ehamberg 14y ago

https://twitter.com/SteveStreza/status/301725620172386304 https://twitter.com/SteveStreza/status/301725620172386304: New hobby: Inspecting the source of blog posts complaining about Opera adopting WebKit and finding -webkit prefixes without -o equivalents.

dylan-m 14y ago
My new hobby: Inspecting the source of blog posts that act like prefixed CSS styles are healthy standards that must be conformed to, and finding -o and -webkit prefixes without -dylans-browser equivalents. Less sarcastic version: This is only a problem if the developer neglects to include an unprefixed version, and even that is perfectly excusable if the syntax remains up in the air (like box-shadow was for a while). As soon as the style is in a standard, it works in the version of Opera that supports that standard. There is absolutely no reason a web developer should be expected to implement nonstandard code for a specific browser, and when it happens one must keep in mind: the standard isn't finished, it could break some day, and it needs to be closely watched and regularly tested. If you are using prefixed styles without testing each of them, you're considerably worse than the person who isn't using them at all.

runn1ng 14y ago

I see this as a win for open source software. (Or "free software". I never know.) Opera never open-sourced its rendering engine Presto, keeping it as a jewel of sorts. On the other hand, Apple always shared the WebKit code, so Google could come, fork it and make it better. Opera thought that keeping Presto proprietary will give them advantage in the market. Instead, it made it obsolete and irrelevant.

dylan-m 14y ago
I totally agree with you here, but I just need to correct you on something. Webkit is based on KHTML, which was available with the LGPL license. Of course, it's much more Webkit than KHTML at this point, but it isn't so much that Apple shared the Webkit code as they wisely forked a mature open source project and followed its license ;)
mikaelj 14y ago
Apple shared? Get with the program: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KHTML http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KHTML

bvcqw 14y ago

Hope this doesn't lead to layoffs at Opera.

marizmelo 14y ago

It was about time. Webkit is becoming the de facto browser engine. People will say that this kills competition, but competition is just good when brings better alternatives, Opera is not the case.

rdl 14y ago

Now we just have to wait for Firefox to adopt WebKit, and...Lynx?

networked 14y ago

Their move is understandable, but it'll be something of a pity if this affects Opera's performance. From personal experience I can say that Opera is pretty much the only current browser that can deliver a combination of acceptable speed and rendering quality on really outdated x86 hardware. I have tested it on a ThinkPad T23 with a Pentium III-M CPU and 1024 MB RAM running Ubuntu 10.04, as well as an early Pentium 4-M Windows XP-equipped laptop we needed to set up as a kind of an info kiosk at work. Opera felt way more responsive than Firefox, Chromium or even Midori on both. If Opera switching to WebKit makes it no longer reasonably usable on this hardware it would mean replacing those machines sooner rather than later. It's not that big of a deal, but the costs can build up with volume and I'm sure we aren't going to be the only ones affected. Edit: rephrased for clarity.

g8oz 14y ago

As someone who has been using Opera since the 90's, this makes me sad.

acqq 14y ago

Opera users were bullied by Google for years. Even when some Google's site would work perfectly in Opera when the Opera would identify itself as IE or Firefox, Google would sometimes even reject user's attempt to access some of their sites. To the users of Opera, it was obvious that it was done intentionally -- on Google scale, they were bullying up to 300 million users who mostly selected Opera exactly because it runs better on the less CPU-powerful hardware. I write this on the Sony notebook made in 2002, which has very slow processor for today's standards but I had the pleasure to enjoy the hi-res 1400x1050 IPS screen during all the years when you were only able to buy TN on the notebooks http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p8MO-XaCZ_8 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p8MO-XaCZ_8 Opera was my savior through the years.

jamese 14y ago

Now if only Microsoft would do the same with Internet Explorer!

Dylanlacey 14y ago

We already had a monoculture; Opera not using Webkit wasn't preventing this because as you can see in the comments in this page, most non-Opera users considered its existence silly and never catered for it. I love Opera. It's been my main browser since I started using the 'net (1996). But developers have always ignored it, always considered it not worth developing for because "there's no users". They didn't hold out against the monoculture, they just did their own thing for a while until they got tired of it. And I think they are tired. They're talking about finally impacting the future of the web and being able to make widespread contributions. I think as a company they just love the Internet and want to be able to make it as awesome as possible for as many people as possible, and Presto wasn't allowing them to do that.

nevster 14y ago

Can anyone help me understand that 300 million number? Taking a rough estimate of 2% market share from here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers, if all 7 billion people in the world used the internet, it still only works out at 140 million people.

itsbits 14y ago

I hope Firefox and IE do the same..Atleast in HTML5 we have common engine...

DigitalSea 14y ago

I don't understand why people are so outraged by this... Webkit has proven itself as a worthy browser engine, as a web developer Webkit is responsible for bringing back the fun into web development (for me at least) and lets face it how many developers even test their sites in Opera any more with exception of a few? This is great news because lets face it, Webkit is one of the best engines out there, period. That's not to say that Opera is a bad browser, it was ahead of its time in many aspects. Optimised for lower hardware specs, optimised for limited bandwidth, mouse gestures and a really nice & clean user interface. But you have to know when to cut your loses and, "if you can't beat them, join them".

msoad 14y ago
WebKit is not a "browser engine".
- DigitalSea 14y ago
  Layout engine, browser engine. Same thing to me. No need to nitpick.

SirPulse 14y ago

Does this not create a webkit monoculture? Find a security flaw in website and suddenly two thirds of browsers are vulnerable.

ishansharma 14y ago

Great. Opera was my primary browser before Google Chrome. I tried sticking to it but it was always left behind. Then as I dived into Google's services more and more, it was clear that Opera wasn't a consideration for Google. Want to Drag and Drop something in GMail, not possible! Any other cool features on many other websites, no! Now that they are switching to Webkit, I hope Opera gets support for all these features.

glennos 14y ago

Sounds like great news. Hopefully those extra resources can go into returning the GUI to the best in the business and at that point, I look forward to returning. In the meantime, Chrome will keep me warm.